In today's business society, customer relations and customer satisfaction are critical for successful and profitable operations. Customers purchase various products and services from a variety of providers, and use various purchase means. When customers purchase various products and services, they often have questions, concerns, or complaints about their purchases. To maximize customer satisfaction, businesses must be capable of responding quickly and effectively to customer questions, concerns, or complaints. Many businesses employ customer care agents in interaction centers (IC) who are responsible for interacting with customers. These agents may interact with customers personally or over the telephone. More recently, many customer care agents engage in interactive chat sessions with customers over the Internet or by e-mail and other channels. These chat sessions allow agents to communicate quickly and easily with customers all over the world.
In recent years, interaction centers have become much more widespread. A call center is one type of IC that has agents to receive calls from customers. The interaction center agents may deal with, for example, customer service calls or sales calls. The interaction centers manage many efforts, and interaction center agents working in these centers often place and receive thousands of calls to and from various customers in different regions of the country. These agents often use headsets to speak with customers while they enter information relating to the customers into a computer workstation.
Managers may be hired to improve the efficiency of the interaction center. A manager may need to monitor the activities within the center and, in particular, the activities of interaction center agents working in the center.
Managers may check the real-time status of the interaction center to assure that interaction center agents are adhering to their schedules and that calls are being handled expeditiously. A manager may rely on, for example, a scheduling of calls to maximize the use of the fewest interaction center agents to handle the volume of incoming calls. The manager may monitor the interaction center to ensure there is adequate coverage at all times.
Displaying an interaction center agent schedule can help the manager to monitor an agent and helping to organize the agent's time. In one example, a manager may not have a particular agent start an evaluation session that takes an estimated 45 minutes if the agent is scheduled complete his or her shift in less time. Because interaction centers may receive calls from customers that are geographically widespread, interaction center agents, in some cases, have to interact with customers who speak a variety of different languages. For example, in a product support interaction center, interaction center agents may need to field support questions from customers who are located in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In this example, a manager may route an evaluation session to a particular agent having appropriate language skills.